[Traveller] Reworking the Classic Traveller Rumor Matrix

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During my excursions into reaction rolls for Traveller lately I realized that the Traveller book has a template for how to create rumor tables (or just come up with rumors on the fly). Unlike other games (uhm… DnD) which never get into this deeper than having a rumor table in some of their scenarios.

This also obviously was used in the creation of the rumor tables for the early scenario booklets. So if you are interested in how this look in practice you could just check e.g. Kinunir, Leviathan, or Twilight’s Peak to have ready made examples. And I think it works quite well, because those letter codes in the table give a generic idea of what sort of rumor one might encounter.

(speaking off which: rumors also showed up on the Encounter tables, so could be encountered randomly).

And it would even be possible to just roll on it and decide on the fly what sort of rumor (speak: hint) the characters would get.

In my opinion the matrix is a bit too complicated though. There’s at least one additional step in the table between rolling and looking up the result which really doesn’t need to be there.

Now unlike the usual d66 tables modern (Mongoose) Traveller is fond of which give you 36 different values to play with, this one gives you… how many exactly?

There are 36 choices for sure, but there are 26 different values (because it’s using the 26 letters of the English alphabet for them) some of which show up multiple times both in the table and the list of letters. which means there is a certain spread of likelihoods to encounter specific rumors. And because of the way it is structured the more general rumors in the lower part of the table are in there more often than others.

OK, no, I have to make this a bit clearer.

Let’s find out how this works: all letter codes show up at least once, for 26 letters.
Letter codes U V, W, and X show up thrice, and are designated General Rumors.
Letter Codes Y and Z show up twice, also as General Rumors, but they are designated specific and misleading background data.

This means from 36 different values 20 should provide info for the adventure at hand, the other 16 should provide general data.
In addition multiple values in the 20 first letters of the alphabet have the same category as others.

Major Fact C and Major Fact P have the same likelihood to appear, at 1/36. They should be different major facts though.
Reference to library data W and L have different weights. The more generic W has a chance of 3/36 to show up, while L merely shows up in 1/36 cases.

The differences between the categories sometimes are a bit fluent. How do I make a clue that is veiled instead of misleading?
On the other hand, it just gives a framework to work with so this is OK for now.

So now lets rework that table into something easier to use:
If my knowledge of statistics hasn’t completely left me, all the entries on the table above should have the same chance of happening (unless using biased dice). But that means we can just cut down on the whole thing and not lose anything from it.

And here we have it. Now to create a rumor table for an adventure or a location merely write down the letters A to Z, then fill in appropriate info. You don’t even have to fill all of it anew all the time. Just leave every entry over 42 the same and just change it on occasion (maybe after PCs have encountered it once or twice), leaving you with 20 rumors, hints, and infodumps you want to feed your players.